Donald Trump is Evil

I mean that.

The word is old and it is precise. It has fallen out of fashion in the commentariat because the commentariat is in the business of euphemism, and euphemism is the dialect of people who have something to lose. Authoritarian. Illiberal. Norm-breaking. Anti-democratic. Each of these words is a step backward from the thing itself. Each of them buys the speaker a little more distance from the cost of saying what is in front of all of us. I am done with that distance. The man is evil. He is not complicated. He is not misunderstood. He is not a vessel for forces larger than himself, though forces larger than himself have certainly found their vessel. He is a man, and the man is evil, and the evidence is the daily record of his life.

He wants his face in our passports. He wants his name on our institutions. He wants his image on the money. These are not stray ambitions. These are not the eccentric flourishes of a man who has been in power too long. These are the documentary practices of tyranny, and they are older than the republic he was sworn to defend. Caesar put his face on the coins. Mao put his face on the currency. Kim puts his face on every wall. The American president now wants his face on the passport of every citizen who leaves the country in his name. That sentence ought to be enough. In a serious country it would be enough.

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Why is anybody around him tolerating this insanity.

The question is not rhetorical. I want it asked out loud, by name, in the rooms where it matters, by the people who go home at night and tell themselves they are the adults in the room. I want it asked of the Cabinet members who have signed on to be the cabinet of a man whose pathology is not a secret and has never been a secret. I want it asked of the aides who walk down the hallway with their phones in their hands and pretend they did not hear what they just heard. I want it asked of the Senate Republicans who have voted, vote after vote, to let this man put his name and his face and his will on the institutions of the United States. I want it asked of the donors who have written the checks. I want it asked of the lawyers who have drafted the briefs. I want it asked of the press secretaries who have stood at the podium and said the words they were told to say. I want it asked of every single one of them, and I want them to have to answer it, and I want the answer to be on the record.

There is no good answer. There is only the answer of careerism, and the answer of cowardice, and the answer of the ambient corruption of being in the orbit of a man whose pathology you have to pretend not to see. The aides who tell their friends he is not really like that. The Cabinet members who tell themselves they are the bulwark. The Senate Republicans who tell themselves they are the moderating influence. The donors who tell themselves they are funding tax policy. The legal team that tells itself it is doing the work of the law. Each of these is a lie. Each of these is a lie that the person telling it knows is a lie. And each of these lies is the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute infrastructure by which an evil man is permitted to put his face on the passports of a free people.

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I have written, in these pages, about the donor class that funds him. I have written about the executives who have decided that the cost of resistance is higher than the cost of accommodation. I have written about the legal and commentariat class that has made a profession of laundering the indefensible. I have written about the tech and finance orbit that has been preparing for this for thirty years. I have written about the older categories that the present moment is recovering. Each of these pieces is part of one argument. The argument is that the man at the center is not alone. He has never been alone. He is at the center of a structure, and the structure is composed of human beings, and every one of those human beings has made the choice, every day, to be where they are.

The man is the symptom and also the cause. The structure is the symptom and also the cause. Both things can be true. Both things are true. But the moral fact at the center of the structure is the man, and the man is evil, and to refuse to say so is to participate in the laundering operation by which a free country is taught to accept the unacceptable one euphemism at a time.

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I know how this language reads. I know the reflex it produces in the well-trained reader of American political prose. Evil is the word the serious are supposed to avoid. The serious are supposed to speak of incentive structures, of institutional design, of the distorting effects of media ecology, of the rational choices made by rational actors under conditions of polarization. The serious are supposed to speak in the passive voice. The serious are supposed to use the word concerning when they mean evil and the word unprecedented when they mean evil and the word destabilizing when they mean evil. I have been reading this prose for a decade. It has not worked. It was not designed to work. It was designed to allow the people who write it to keep their jobs in a profession whose business model depends on not naming the thing that is in front of all of us.

I am not in that profession. I do not have that business model. I have these pages, and I have my own name on them, and I have the older words.

The man is evil. The structure around him is composed of people who know he is evil and have decided, every day, to be there anyway. The country is being run by a coalition of one pathological human being and several thousand careerists who have agreed not to use the word that describes him. The passports are next. The money is next. The institutions are next. These are not predictions. These are the announced intentions of the man in question.

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Why is anybody around him tolerating this insanity.

I want every reader of these pages to ask that question of every person they know who is, in any way, in that orbit. The brother-in-law who works for a contractor. The college friend who took the job at the agency. The neighbor who writes the op-eds. The cousin who answers the phones in the Senate office. The acquaintance who signs the checks. Ask them. Make them answer. Do not let them off with it is complicated or you do not understand the inside or the alternative would be worse. There is no alternative that would be worse than putting the face of an evil man on the passport of a free people. There is no inside knowledge that justifies it. There is no complication that absolves it. The question is simple, and it deserves a simple answer, and the absence of a simple answer is itself the answer.

The man is evil. The people around him know it. They have made the choice to be around him anyway. That choice is the substance of the present American crisis. It is not a crisis of institutions, though the institutions are being destroyed. It is not a crisis of norms, though the norms are being violated. It is a crisis of individual human beings making individual human choices to participate in something they know to be wrong. Every one of those choices is recoverable. Every one of those people could, tomorrow morning, walk out of the building and say what they know to be true. Every one of them is choosing not to. That choice is the thing.

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I write this knowing it will be called intemperate. I write this knowing it will be called unserious. I write this knowing that the people who have spent a decade training themselves not to use the older words will say that the older words are not useful. I do not care. The older words are accurate. The accuracy is the use. There is no version of the present moment in which the failure to name the man results in the man being less of what he is. There is only the version in which the failure to name him results in the rest of us forgetting how to say it.

Donald Trump is evil. He wants his face on the passports of a free people. He wants his name on the institutions of a republic that is older than him and was meant to outlast him. He wants the documentary practices of tyranny, and he is being given them, one signature at a time, by people who know exactly what they are doing.

Why is anybody around him tolerating this insanity.

Ask them.